what the occasion Mallender was not certainbut it was vital that he eventually be invited

to find purpose for his visionshe had to go and make a new friend

Fools of Inconsequence VIII.

a casual vision after running into Boulet

in the bathroom the young men nodded at each other

and went their own waysBoulet back to AP Chem△△△Mallender to the futurebackstage at the Mullins Center

for graduation it would be May

Boulet returned his tromboneMallender his trumpet

to their cases both without polishing the horns

BOULET
This means we’re rising juniors now. Upperclassmen.

It didn’t take a psychic to know someone would utter such terribly obvious words, and Mallender felt sorry that out of all the awkward personalities anxious to fill the silence that everyone but Mallender found uncomfortable (especially after a performance), Boulet was the one to be so compelled. Overcompensating for his weight again—at least this wasn’t the full on perversions he would perform in Toronto on the band field trip in the hotel room with the Sprite bottle and the momentary but utter abandonment of his decency.

yet now Boulet could see himselfwithout his modest corpulence

or disparaged hobbies or work ethic eclipsing his worth as an individual

Mallender had to laugh at how such minor glimpses of the future could so motivate (though it was more often to terrorize) the average person. Yes, how the spread of human history could be summarized by hasty or weak or immature responses to time—Mallender thought of the many ways a single potential future became so overwhelming a person could do nothing but ensure its actuality: soldiers fleeing battles they would’ve been instrumental in winning, his father’s first play burned in a backyard in Palmer to mark the end of what should have been a literary beginning or Governments cutting taxes or providing immediate boons to bring upon prosperity when such actions only hasten the end—to come then to Boulet, often too timid to see himself in any other way except how he believed others saw him in the specious present: an awkward and unhandsome ginger doomed to the middling echelons of the geek hierarchy—until circumstance, pomp and tradition told him that the socially-constructed concept of time had just now endowed him with more respect among his peers and thereby in his own mind made him more beautiful.

walking outside Mallender saw

a gathering of mourning doves lift out of a tree and park

in unison on the groundBoulet saw it too and remarked

BOULET
The birds alight as if they know.
MALLENDER
What?
BOULET
When a bird descends from a tree or higher place to fly, it is said to alight.
MALLENDER
Oh.

△△△Mallender stood in front of the bathroom mirror

and hardly recognized himself when his vision returned to the present

He didn’t exactly see what Boulet was getting at with the word alight; he was convinced it meant to take off—to take off upwards or he thought maybe the wind is dark when a bird is not in flight upon it. When the bird descends as if from out of nowhere onto the air (which is colorless and simply the movement of itself), it transforms, lights up in its own way: to just think of all the birds taking off or in flight in one moment and all the others descending or landed—say lights in a city: maintained, turned off, switched back on— the idea or the feeling of the two extremes coinciding absence and presence in such magnitude returned Mallender— it brought him back to his journey to Ludlow’s early history, the privilege and exactitude of that knowledge, the massive potential and feeling—that hope expressed and continued into the present bestowed Mallender with a luminosity the halogen lights of the hallway knew nothing of.

Ben Pease is a board member of the Ruth Stone Foundation and an editor of Monk Books. His first full-length collection of poems, Chateau Wichman, is forthcoming from Big Lucks Books, and more work can be found online at fugitivesofspeech.tumblr.com/works. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the poet and artist Bianca Stone.